So my blog is now one year old!!!

Unfortunately I didn’t get any cake for myself. I bought the domain back Feburary 2014, and setup the WordPress blog official on 4th April 2014. Since then, its been a kick ass ride producing content, appearing as a guest blogger on other sites and generally earning appreciation and respect from my peers.

Originally I planned to create educational content for budding system / IT admins to pass the CompTIA A+ Exams, as I used to be a lecture to mature students teaching the CompTIA curriculum. Producing content for online consumption and possible print is hard work, and I’ve yet to find time to properly dedicate myself to this, so instead of making a half-ass attempt at it, the idea has been shelved for now.

Instead I just blog stuff from my day-to-day work that I think would be helpful to others. Or because I know I’ll need to use the info in the future (my most used post is adding HP repo’s into VMware update manager)

The Highlights

So here’s some of the highlights from blogging or that’s come of my blogging

• Guest blogger on professionalvmware.com
• Guest blogged for Cisco
• 2 x Cisco Champion
• 1 x vExpert
• 4500 page views in a single day thanks to Reddit!!!
• VMUG Speaker
• Sponsorship offer from Veeam
• Completed the Virtual Design Master – 30 posts in 30 days challenge
• Met some great people from around the world to converse with!!!!

The Lows

So basically there is only one low, which came from some bashing I got on a LinkedIn group. I had posted a link to my “How to produce good documentation” series, I did this after receiving some great feedback from the Virtualisation community on twitter, and in some smaller LinkedIn groups (Member number wise). So I posted it into an IT Architects group, to which I received a few comments of positivity, but the rest was flaming.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind criticism, however a few individuals went too far, and called out issues they had with blog and other posts as well. My main problem was the fact they offered nothing in return, so I nothing I could learn from. Funnily enough, the argument that ensued on LinkedIn also produced my blogs most views in a day, 1’500. Something which I hated as it had negative reasons behind it.

This knocked my confidence a great deal, and lead to me winding down on my blogging. I lost my ability to sit down and start typing. I stopped dissecting my day-to-day work, wondering if I could explain it and make it useful to others.

Slowly though, I’ve managed to get back on top. After some consideration, I posted the same article links on Reddit, after seeing how active and open-minded most of the community is, and waited to find out if it was a mistake. Luckily for me, it wasn’t. The old most views in a day was wiped out (see above), and I received some great feedback on the posts, and also feedback on how to improve them to ensure the right users feel targeted.

So cheers everyone

To anyone that’s visited my blog, shared posts from my blog, provided comments, feedback or what have you!

I’ve got 4 blog posts in draft at the moment that I’m trying to finish, two of which are around Cisco UCS implementations.

So here’s to another year of blogging, and getting to know more people in the community and giving more back to the community!!!!

Regards

Dean

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